Josiah,
Though a reasonable question and request, I think it presents all kinds of problems:
1) most of the best "serious" scientific and medical research has been done in China and Japan. Due to the way money is allocated to research here in the West, it much harder to get funding for such studies.
2) skepticism can be very healthy and my experience with qigong healing is that it is perfectly fine to be skeptical. It works anyway!
As Chunyi Lin says, "In SFQ, if you believe it, it works! If you don't believe it... it still works! However, it may work faster if you believe it. But either way it works."
Nevertheless, for many people, skepticism of anything that is alien or strange is almost like a religion and there is nothing that will convince them (short of their own experience of healing. And even then sometimes!
)
3) I don't have any special knowledge of such studies, I just entered into google, "peer-review" "qigong" and came up with some links. However, from my quick photoreading perusal of what I found, people who are skeptical will still be after reading most of this material. It will not change their mind.
It is mostly a dead end to try and do so. Master Lin tends to dissuade us from trying to "convince" people of the validity of this. For those who are in need of healing and are willing to at least let us "practice", they will often be convinced, or at least will question their own skepticism.
But whether they are convinced or not, is not important. The important thing is to still help them if we can, and if they heal, it is irrelevant whether they attribute it to qigong, time, their medical treatments, God, or whatever.
4) Peer-reviewed studies have all kinds of problems anyway, and don't necessarily show validity!
For example, this excerpt from the Wikipedia article, states it very nicely:
Wikipedia Peer-review critques Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, has said that "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity [italics mine] — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." [11]
Here are a few links that I found. The first one, a book review, I think sums up the problem nicely also:
qigongbookreview Here is a list of others:
qigongpapers This next site has many little articles on medical studies done using Tai Chi (which itself features qigong and in any serious Tai Chi school, Qigong will be also studied as part of the Tai Chi practice):
WorldTaiChiDay For example, this one:
Tai Chi & Cancer Or this one on Tai Chi, Qigong and Fybromyalgia:
Qigong & Fybromyalgia This little article from the Ohio State University Medical School summarizes qigong in medical applications and sums up the problems with trying to use research to validate it:
Ohio State University To wit, this quote:
The Science
Most scientific reports were published as abstracts in Chinese, which makes accessing the information difficult. But Sancier has collected more than 2,000 records in his Qi gong database, which indicates that qi gong has extensive health benefits on conditions ranging from blood pressure to asthma. The reported studies, however, are largely anecdotal case series and not randomized controlled trials. Few studies have been conducted outside China and reported in peer-reviewed journals in English. There have been no large clinical trials. A search of PubMed found 13 small but clinically relevant trials. The strongest evidence seems to be for lowering moderately elevated blood pressure. One interesting, but so far un-replicated, study found a 1,000 fold increase in magnetic field strength around the hands of an experienced Qi-gong practitioner. What that may mean clinically is unclear and whether this study can be replicated is yet to be seen.
Anyway, there is a lot more like all of the above. I am skeptical
about any of these things helping someone who is into "scientism" or with strong materialist bias open their mind.
What will help is more healing!
So that is what I focus on.
Anyway, I hope this helps you in some small way. Thanks for asking. I learned somethings from this.
Can anyone direct me to peer-reviewed studies validating the usefulness of SFQ or Qigong in general? A skeptical family member asked me if any existed. Thank you,
-Josiah
